Latest / California Frontier / 021: An Epic Journey Through Time: Documentary Producer Trudi Angell

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021: An Epic Journey Through Time: Documentary Producer Trudi Angell · California Frontier

• 0:00
  Damian Bacich: I am here with Trudy Angel, and this is something I've really been looking forward to talking to her about this wonderful documentary that she made called La Récua.
• 0:13
  Damian Bacich: So Trudy, um, can you tell us a little bit about yourself before we talk about the, uh, the documentary, which I loved and I hope everybody gets a chance to see.
• 0:23
  Damian Bacich: Can, can you give us a little bit about, uh, background about yourself and, and maybe, you know, how you wound up exactly getting into a project like this.
• 0:33
  trudi-angell_2_09-13-2023_130425: Yes, it's quite a story.
• 0:36
  trudi-angell_2_09-13-2023_130425: Uh, and thank you Damien, for inviting me on the show, and I was really thrilled to find your website.
• 0:43
  trudi-angell_2_09-13-2023_130425: Uh, as I've been cruising around looking at who might just be interested in this film, and that's how I found you is, uh, going to the al I love your t-shirt, Alta California established in 1769.
• 0:57
  trudi-angell_2_09-13-2023_130425: I need to get
• 0:57
  Damian Bacich: You know what?
• 0:59
  Damian Bacich: I didn't know when I came up with the idea for that t-shirt is that up in the Sierra Foothills, there's actually a town called Alta California, I have run into a few people who were asking me if, if it was about that town, I was like, no, it's
• 1:18
  Trudi Angell: no then you, then you end up getting into a long story with them.
• 1:21
  Trudi Angell: I bet.
• 1:22
  Damian Bacich: yeah, exactly.
• 1:23
  Damian Bacich: Exactly.
• 1:25
  Trudi Angell: Well, basically that's how I got started with this whole story and this whole, this whole film.
• 1:31
  Trudi Angell: Um, I started going down to Baja.
• 1:34
  Trudi Angell: I I was born and raised, uh, here in Calistoga, California.
• 1:39
  Damian Bacich: That's right.
• 1:40
  Damian Bacich: You and I have the Napa Valley connection.
• 1:42
  Trudi Angell: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:44
  Trudi Angell: You were in Saint Helena and, um, so I was, yeah, born and raised here.
• 1:49
  Trudi Angell: I had horses when I was a teenager, rode all over the valley and up into the hills and, and, um, so that was kind of my background here.
• 1:59
  Trudi Angell: Did a lot of swimming at the local swimming pools here in Calistoga.
• 2:03
  Trudi Angell: And so I was kind of outdoorsy.
• 2:05
  Trudi Angell: And so back when I was 20, uh, in about, oh, when was that?
• 2:11
  Trudi Angell: Uh, 19, uh, 75, 76.
• 2:15
  Trudi Angell: It was when I picked up a catalog for the National Outdoor Leadership School, uh, Knowles.
• 2:23
  Trudi Angell: And it's based in Lander, Wyoming, actually, uh, since the late sixties.
• 2:28
  Trudi Angell: And, because I wasn't particularly interested in snow camping, I.
• 2:34
  Trudi Angell: Uh, this was winter time that I picked up the brochure and I saw this ad for, um, a trip down to Baja to learn sea kayaking.
• 2:43
  Trudi Angell: And I thought, oh, good sun and sand and beaches.
• 2:46
  Trudi Angell: That sounds more my style.
• 2:48
  Trudi Angell: And so I signed up to do a, a 12 day course and I ended up staying six weeks, uh, buying a kayak when I got back up here to California, Alta, California, and then ended up, um, Just traveling down to Baja quite a bit.
• 3:07
  Trudi Angell: And I always did well with language, with Spanish in school, both in St.
• 3:12
  Trudi Angell: Helena when I went to Robert Louis Stevenson, as you probably did, and then also to, uh, in Calistoga High School here.
• 3:20
  Trudi Angell: And so I, I just, it kind of fit when I went down and I started driving my old 1964 Rambler American down the Baja Highway with my folding kayak on top of it.
• 3:32
  Trudi Angell: Uh, it became a lifestyle, it truly, or a lifestyle for many, many years.
• 3:37
  Trudi Angell: And so finally in the early eighties, I started, I was, I was in the right place at the right time when sea kayaking as adventure travel and, um, You know, Baja as a destination kind of, kind of came together, you know, and so I knew the coastline.
• 3:57
  Trudi Angell: I, uh, and I started running kayak tours small at first, but then it worked into a nice little business and a, and a fun lifestyle.
• 4:06
  Trudi Angell: But somewhere in there, also in about the mid eighties, a friend of mine who had been taking people up into the rock art canyons in Baja, uh, to look at indigenous paintings, amazing, um, world Heritage class now, uh, indigenous cave paintings.
• 4:26
  Trudi Angell: And they invited me out on a mule pack trip.
• 4:29
  Trudi Angell: So I hadn't really ridden since I was in high school.
• 4:33
  Trudi Angell: And now I was about in my late, uh, twenties, maybe around 30.
• 4:38
  Trudi Angell: And I got on a mule and thought, Ugh, I wanna be a cowgirl.
• 4:42
  Trudi Angell: I.
• 4:42
  Trudi Angell: And so I, I ended up, uh, starting to ride around, bought my own horse.
• 4:48
  Trudi Angell: By then I was living in Loreto during seasonally coming up to Calistoga as I still continue to do in the summertime.
• 4:56
  Trudi Angell: And then I kept going back down to Baja and I would start leading some mule pack trips too.
• 5:04
  Trudi Angell: Uh, and basically I got out on those El Camino real trails, the very first El Camino real trails on the west coast of North America, which started in what we now know as Cabo.
• 5:20
  Trudi Angell: And then, um, you know, ended up all the way up here in, in Monterey and Sonoma being the final one.
• 5:28
  Trudi Angell: And I thought, oh, what a fun connection.
• 5:30
  Trudi Angell: You know, I've been in the Sonoma area all my life, and now I'm in the area in Loreto where all of this Mission California missions, um,.The indigenous histories of, of the people on the, on the California Peninsula.
• 5:48
  Trudi Angell: And of course, as you know, California, the first, California was where I live right now in Loreto and farther south to us.
• 5:56
  Trudi Angell: That's where the Explorers land and first started calling it the island of California.
• 6:02
  Trudi Angell: And so that's, that's how I kind of became my interest in the history of the area and riding with the cowboys and visiting the women and the children and the people on the ranches.
• 6:14
  Trudi Angell: And so it just became another part of a lifestyle.
• 6:18
  Trudi Angell: I kind of handed off my, my si my sea kayaking business to my other guides.
• 6:23
  Trudi Angell: And then I started exploring the mountains because that became, oh boy, another 30 years of things to explore up in this area.
• 6:33
  Trudi Angell: And it certainly worked into that.
• 6:35
  Trudi Angell: So on one of our first trips that we did from, um, Loreto area and up to the mission called San Javier, which is just west of Loreto.
• 6:48
  Trudi Angell: I, back in the nineties, late eighties, probably late eighties, I heard about this old, um, not so old then.
• 6:57
  Trudi Angell: He, he was actually forties, fifties, probably at the time.
• 7:00
  Trudi Angell: But a saddle maker, a regional saddle maker who was making the traditional old California styles of saddles, the, the saddles that were basically developed in that desert environment for the type of cattle, roundups and Uh, travel that these VAEs had to do in those areas.
• 7:25
  Trudi Angell: So it was a very unique and specific to the area type of saddle.
• 7:30
  Trudi Angell: So I went riding off one day with my three-year-old daughter sitting in front of me in the saddle.
• 7:36
  Trudi Angell: I had kind of tied her on around my waist and we went off and rode five hours cross country with um, one of, one of our local elderly vaquero guides.
• 7:48
  Trudi Angell: And I couldn't see a trail, but obviously he knew where we were going.
• 7:54
  Trudi Angell: And went really just cross country and ended up down in a little canyon where a very amazing, wonderful family was living.
• 8:02
  Trudi Angell: And that was Rio Ira.
• 8:06
  Trudi Angell: Uh, Rio Ira Mesa was the old saddle maker and his family of, uh, two, three boys.
• 8:15
  Trudi Angell: Three boys and one girl who were all in, in about their teens at that point.
• 8:21
  Trudi Angell: Uh, we just all became the best of friends.
• 8:24
  Trudi Angell: My daughter and I, and another friend we rode in.
• 8:28
  Trudi Angell: They accepted us like family.
• 8:30
  Trudi Angell: We had our cowboy guy.
• 8:31
  Trudi Angell: It was just such a unique experience, um, to arrive at a roadless ranch, a place where cars couldn't even get to.
• 8:41
  Trudi Angell: So their way of travel and lifestyle was to load up a donkey and ride many, many hours just to get out to a road head where they could get supplies.
• 8:52
  Trudi Angell: And so they, they knew how to, of course, raise their cattle in the back country.
• 8:58
  Trudi Angell: Dario knew what were the plants that were needed to build the tree of the saddle or the base of the saddle.
• 9:06
  Trudi Angell: What plants and, uh, bark, uh, or roots were needed to tan the hides.
• 9:13
  Trudi Angell: And it was fascinating and so many, for many years when I started to run the tours, uh, and that became a popular thing to do, it was to run these, these tours to go out and visit these outback families.
• 9:30
  Trudi Angell: Um, they just, we all became the best of friends.
• 9:35
  Trudi Angell: And after about 25 or more years of doing that, riding around to his ranch and taking people there and discovering how charismatic he always has been, he's just a natural teacher at heart.
• 9:53
  Trudi Angell: He loves to tell people about his lifestyle, the family, how he builds things, um, with and how they survived actually eating cactus and indigenous foods when, when that was all that they could get ahold of.
• 10:09
  Trudi Angell: So he had a fascinating background.
• 10:12
  Trudi Angell: It was like riding back into time, a hundred years, uh, to, to go out to their ranch and one day, so then later on they moved a little bit farther down canyon and set up a ranch in a little bit wider area where their cattle could graze.
• 10:30
  Trudi Angell: And they built corrals and, and, uh, made, made it be a place where they could actually have a little bit of road access.
• 10:38
  Trudi Angell: It was still about three hours from any major city.
• 10:42
  Trudi Angell: Um, we would still ride, we would do a loop trip and leave from Sun Javier or Loreto area and, and take our guests and go camp out in the back country and mid Tripp.
• 10:55
  Trudi Angell: We'd end up at his ranch and it was such a breath of fresh air.
• 11:00
  Trudi Angell: We would, there was fresh water there.
• 11:02
  Trudi Angell: We would take baths.
• 11:03
  Trudi Angell: The women would.would cook a meal for us.
• 11:06
  Trudi Angell: We, it was like old home week, it would be like just visiting friends.
• 11:10
  Trudi Angell: And Dia was always so wonderful about, um, teaching the guests who were on my trip about how the old saddles were made and how the old pack saddles were made.
• 11:26
  Trudi Angell: So after many, many years of doing that, like I say, I started doing that in about, it must have been about 94 when I rode into his ranch the first time.
• 11:38
  Trudi Angell: And by 2017, I had a small group we'd ridden in.
• 11:45
  Trudi Angell: He was doing what he always did with being charismatic and showing all these beautiful hand tooled saddles to my guests.
• 11:54
  Trudi Angell: And he suddenly looked at me and he said, Trudy, for years I've been wanting to reenact.
• 12:03
  Trudi Angell: An old time pack train, just like my grandfather used to do.
• 12:07
  Trudi Angell: And I used to sit around the campfires when I was just a little kid.
• 12:12
  Trudi Angell: And I would listen to the stories about how these old time packers would load up a dozen donkeys in the village of Du or Lamo, which is about 300 or so more kilometers to the north of the capital city of La Paz, which was a port city.
• 12:30
  Trudi Angell: And they would load up and they would ride for a couple of weeks down to La Paz, taking goods from the villages or the ranches along the way, trading it in La Paz for things that they couldn't grow on the ranches or rice and, and flour from the mills there and bring them back again.
• 12:51
  Trudi Angell: And he said, and I've always wanted to do that.
• 12:54
  Trudi Angell: I've always wanted to, to be one of those old packers and relive that story and, and You know, I think I'd like to do that sometime and I want it on film.
• 13:10
  Trudi Angell: I went, oh, okay.
• 13:13
  Trudi Angell: Let's do it.
• 13:14
  Trudi Angell: I'll help you.
• 13:16
  Trudi Angell: Oh my God.
• 13:18
  Trudi Angell: that was quite a statement, um, six years ago now.
• 13:23
  Trudi Angell: We now went through the whole process.
• 13:25
  Trudi Angell: It was the first time I've ever made a film.
• 13:27
  Trudi Angell: First time Darío has ever made a film, although he'd been in a couple of others.
• 13:32
  Trudi Angell: And I'd been had a little bit of background with, uh, the film called Corazón Vaquero, uh, which I
• 13:39
  Damian Bacich: Oh, I love that.
• 13:40
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 13:41
  Trudi Angell: Okay.
• 13:42
  Trudi Angell: So you'll see in there, um, my friends Gary McClintock, who is an old saddle maker and Uh, he passed away a few years ago, but, um, that was his, his, uh, dream also was to make a movie back in the, around 2005, 2006.
• 14:02
  Trudi Angell: Gary called me up and said, Hey, Trudy, can you take me to some place?
• 14:06
  Trudi Angell: Um, places in Baja where people are still doing traditional old California style of, of um, building things and making things, and especially saddle makers.
• 14:20
  Trudi Angell: And I thought, ah, I know where we're going.
• 14:23
  Trudi Angell: So we traveled with, uh, Cody, his son and another woman Eve Ewing, who had been traveling all over the Baja California Peninsula by Mule since the 1960s, uh, and was very famous in her own right for being one of the first people to take people into the, those rock art, the cave cave painting areas.
• 14:48
  Trudi Angell: which is up to the north of Dario.
• 14:50
  Trudi Angell: And so it was, um, it just seemed natural for Dario to say, okay, I've been in one movie already, maybe actually he'd been in couple movies being interviewed about his knowledge, his old traditional California knowledge.
• 15:07
  Trudi Angell: And so he said, well, let's just make a movie.
• 15:10
  Trudi Angell: And I said, okay, well I'll just help you.
• 15:13
  Trudi Angell: But little did I know what it was going to involve.
• 15:18
  Trudi Angell: And uh, so that was it.
• 15:20
  Trudi Angell: In 2017, he said, I wanna do this thing.
• 15:24
  Trudi Angell: I want it on film.
• 15:25
  Trudi Angell: And I said, okay, I'll help you.
• 15:28
  Damian Bacich: That's, that's really something, you know, just, um, backtracking a little bit, that movie I, um, I used to show it in my classes at, uh, San Jose State on, uh, old California history and also Latin American culture.
• 15:47
  Damian Bacich: Students used to love it.
• 15:48
  Damian Bacich: And, uh, it makes sense that, that, that there's a tie in, of course, that you're that you're the link, you know, um, that yeah, that's an, it's an amazing film.
• 15:59
  Damian Bacich: And the protagonist, um, Récua, uh, Dario, you mentioned him a number of times.
• 16:06
  Damian Bacich: He's a real character for sure, but he's, he's a poet.
• 16:14
  Damian Bacich: it's just fascinating to see him on the trail, you know, creating little verses, little little poems, uh, little songs as he's going along.
• 16:23
  Damian Bacich: At least for me, somebody who's studied, you know, the old, uh, Spanish ballots, he's sort of almost a living example of that, of these people who, who carry on that, that, that song, that performance tradition as well, in addition to being very rooted in, in the land and in and in very practical life, right?
• 16:47
  Trudi Angell: Yeah, very practical, uh, very resilient in the back country you go with the punches, with the weather, with your cattle.
• 16:58
  Trudi Angell: Um, you just do what you have to do.
• 17:01
  Trudi Angell: And, uh, a really fun background story you like.
• 17:05
  Trudi Angell: Now that you've seen Dario in both films, now that I know that, that, that you, that's been part of your background too.
• 17:13
  Trudi Angell: Vaquero, he's the guy who gets bucked off the horse.
• 17:16
  Trudi Angell: Right?
• 17:16
  Damian Bacich: Hmm.
• 17:17
  Trudi Angell: Okay.
• 17:18
  Trudi Angell: So, um, that, that ranch, Rancho Al is the ranch that we begin to film from, uh, a little bit.
• 17:28
  Trudi Angell: Uh, we don't include his ranch too much into the current story of La Récua because it's really much more of an abandoned ranch right now.
• 17:39
  Trudi Angell: Many things have happened in his life and.
• 17:41
  Trudi Angell: Um, his, his health in some ways, and now he's, he's back on track again, so he's doing well.
• 17:48
  Trudi Angell: Um,
• 17:48
  Damian Bacich: and sorry I interrupt, but that's also part of the, of the, the plot of the film.
• 17:54
  Damian Bacich: The plot, if you will, the, the story is his health along the trail.
• 17:58
  Damian Bacich: Right.
• 17:59
  Damian Bacich: Um,
• 18:00
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 18:01
  Trudi Angell: He has bronchitis on the trail and we truly do almost lose him that day.
• 18:07
  Trudi Angell: He couldn't breathe and you don't see the backstory.
• 18:11
  Trudi Angell: Luckily my editor did a great job of cutting out, kind of all of us rushing in and me giving him homeopathic remedies and somebody in the background yelling, give him strong, dark, hot coffee.
• 18:24
  Trudi Angell: And we happened to have some in a thermos.
• 18:27
  Trudi Angell: And so the story doesn't really elaborate on that in, in the film or the, the visuals don't, but there's a lot of background that had to be cut out and, and woven.
• 18:39
  Trudi Angell: Out it, but that's really true.
• 18:40
  Trudi Angell: And then Dios spirit, as he drinks his strong black coffee out, opens the aviola in his lungs, and then he's able to carry on and in fact is the leader of the group and says, no.
• 18:55
  Trudi Angell: What is, what does he say in that moment?
• 18:57
  Trudi Angell: He says, Firo, let's put the pedal to the metal And, and Cha, our actual real trail guide there is like, oh my gosh, he should take a rest.
• 19:10
  Trudi Angell: He should he.
• 19:11
  Trudi Angell: But no, that is spirit And his, um, his desire to complete this trip and do this trip and, and finish this story is overwhelms everything and get carries him through.
• 19:25
  Track 1: So in short, the, the documentary follows him and his group of, um, friends and relatives, right, as they kind of do this.
• 19:38
  Track 1: Um, I don't know what you'd want to call it.
• 19:40
  Track 1: This, carry out this idea that, that you're not a hundred percent sure that it can be done or that it will be done, but along the way you see his determination, good humor, and, and, um, and fearlessness that really, that really gets them through.
• 19:58
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 20:00
  Trudi Angell: So if you, did you get a chance to listen to that little nine minute video clip of an interview that we did in Spanish and uh, it's on one of my websites and
• 20:10
  Track 1: No, I wasn't
• 20:11
  trudi-angell_2_09-13-2023_130425: I might have sent
• 20:12
  Damian Bacich: Oh, I, okay.
• 20:13
  Damian Bacich: So there's a clip where you're, uh, together with the crew
• 20:17
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 20:17
  Damian Bacich: being interviewed.
• 20:18
  Damian Bacich: Yes.
• 20:18
  Damian Bacich: I watched that.
• 20:19
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 20:20
  Trudi Angell: And one of the things I mentioned there is that.
• 20:24
  Trudi Angell: The children, even the children on our trail.
• 20:28
  Trudi Angell: The reason we chose the people who were traveling along with us, well, for one, Dario wanted his family there.
• 20:37
  Trudi Angell: He wanted his son, he wanted his grandson in particular because his story, the whole thread of the story is he was a child at eight years old listening to his grandfather tell the stories.
• 20:50
  Trudi Angell: And so he built that little saddle for his grandson, um, in order to get him on down the trail in the old traditional California style.
• 21:01
  Trudi Angell: And, and he wanted his grandson to, to be for sure part of this film.
• 21:08
  Trudi Angell: And so the children, because little Ena who was 10 years old, lived and grew up on a roadless ranch.
• 21:18
  Trudi Angell: Uh, in the Sierra, there's San Francisco where all the cave paintings are.
• 21:23
  Trudi Angell: And I've known her since before she was born.
• 21:26
  Trudi Angell: I've known her parents since they were young people before they got married.
• 21:30
  Trudi Angell: And um, and then her father, Ricardo, uh, they're two of the other people on the trip.
• 21:36
  Trudi Angell: So it's Dio is the main protagonist telling his story, his son helping him along.
• 21:43
  Trudi Angell: And you see his expertise as we go along, his complete knowledge and ability to, um, survive and keep his animals healthy in the outback, feed them when they need feed, climb up in a tree and break off branches because that's all there is right there.
• 22:01
  Trudi Angell: Uh, it was during the drought season, there was nothing on the ground really to feed them.
• 22:06
  Trudi Angell: And there were many places along that trail.
• 22:08
  Trudi Angell: And as a back part of the backstory of the film, uh, as we left the village of Du, we were all riding mules.
• 22:18
  Trudi Angell: And then when we got to Sun Javier, then we had actually support vehicle for parts of the rest of the trip all the way down to La Paz, the 200 miles along the trails and old roads.
• 22:31
  Trudi Angell: So some of the time, uh, we were able to have feed for the animals and make life a little simpler and feed them alfalfa and, uh, not have to look how to, uh, go and tie up a dozen donkeys and five or six or seven or eight or 10 mules, uh, every day to try to feed them.
• 22:51
  Trudi Angell: So we did have, in the backstory there, is that, yes, we had some, um, definitely we had the vehicle support for many nights of those 20 days on the trail, but there were a half a dozen, maybe seven nights where we as a group or part of the group were, were actually on the trail.
• 23:15
  Trudi Angell: Okay.
• 23:15
  Trudi Angell: And had to camp in a place where there was no road access.
• 23:19
  Trudi Angell: So that's the time when they had to resort to traditional feed that those old Ros, the old packers would've had to done on their whole trip, because way back then there were, there was no alfalfa to, to feed your animals.
• 23:37
  Trudi Angell: Um, so, so as you watch part of that history unfold, you get a, a good sense of what it was like to, to ride through that back country because we had three cameras filming five people on the trail, basically all day long.
• 23:56
  Trudi Angell: So that was hundreds of hours of film that was rolling all day long for 20 days.
• 24:03
  Trudi Angell: And because we call it a"vérité" documentary where you, you don't script it, you don't know what, you don't know what's gonna happen.
• 24:13
  Trudi Angell: And so the fun part is then you just try to film everything that's going on.
• 24:19
  Trudi Angell: And then the editor has the job--or the editing team has the job and storytelling team--script writer afterwards has the job of putting it all together in the actual story that the protagonist wants to tell.
• 24:34
  Trudi Angell: Um, or very key elements that came out of all of that film and sound that were so amazing, such an amazing part of the story that they got.
• 24:45
  Trudi Angell: It got also woven into the story over the end as the editing was going on.
• 24:53
  Trudi Angell: So can we can consider, let's see.
• 24:56
  Trudi Angell: Sergio started editing in December, 2018.
• 25:01
  Trudi Angell: We rode the trail in March, 2018.
• 25:06
  Trudi Angell: It took 20 days to get to La Paz.
• 25:08
  Trudi Angell: We actually had a whole lot of Traditional goods that went on those donkeys
• 25:16
  Damian Bacich: Right.
• 25:16
  Damian Bacich: And in fact, that's one of the, the great scenes, uh, when they do.
• 25:21
  Damian Bacich: You know, spoiler alert when they do reach La Paz, um, when the people are, are crowding around to get, to get a little sample of the, the, the traditional goods, foods that they brought with them and the wine and yeah.
• 25:38
  Damian Bacich: That's, that's a beautiful thing to see the appreciation of the people there in La Paz for this extremely traditional, um, I don't know what you want to call it, this, this, this, um,
• 25:55
  Trudi Angell: yeah, the old town caravans.
• 25:57
  Trudi Angell: Mm-hmm.
• 25:58
  Damian Bacich: Yeah.
• 25:58
  Damian Bacich: This representation of their own traditions, they appreciate that.
• 26:02
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 26:03
  Trudi Angell: Um, yeah, from the whole story from the beginning, when you see those beginning shots in the Village of Comondú where Dario speaks, uh, a little bit, um, a about the, the dates and the cheese and the, uh, dried meat that went along on the trip and the, um, you know, just whatever and the wine from Comondú because Comondú the little village of du up in the heart of the Sierra de La Giganta to the west of Loreta is pretty famous for its wine.
• 26:36
  Trudi Angell: There's a lot of water flowing through this little canyon, and they make great wine there.
• 26:41
  Trudi Angell: And so it was so exciting for the people in La Paz who may have grown up in that area or grown up on branches or in the back country.
• 26:50
  Trudi Angell: Many of them were Dario's relatives.
• 26:53
  Trudi Angell: Uh, they know the story.
• 26:54
  Trudi Angell: They know the story from their own background, their own ancestors, uh, you know, very close their, their own parents.
• 27:02
  Trudi Angell: Uh, and grandparents.
• 27:04
  Trudi Angell: And so yeah, as we, as we show this film, um, to people, and even as the film was in the development stage, it wasn't yet to final cut, Dario and I would sometimes, um, just do a screening of our slideshow about what the film was going to be about and bring a saddle to kind of show people.
• 27:32
  Trudi Angell: And elders in our audiences down in Mexico would get up at the end of our presentation with tears in their eyes and just, um, you know, lumps in their throats and saying, thank you so much for preserving part of our past, and bringing back the memories of what it was like to have these pack trains come through their own ranches back then.
• 27:55
  Trudi Angell: So that's how I, I can explain and, and say that Making this film, it is just so wonderful because it takes you to a really, takes you back in time.
• 28:09
  Trudi Angell: A hun in the reality of 150 years ago of how things were, or even 80 years ago in, in the Baja Peninsula before the road was put in, in the seventies, uh, so many people still traveled by mules and had roadless ranches in the back country, in the mountains.
• 28:27
  Trudi Angell: And right now there's only a few, uh, mostly in the Sierra, the San Francisco of ranches that are still surviving.
• 28:35
  Trudi Angell: I can probably count them on one hand at this point, but when I started riding about 40 years down, 4 35 years ago down there, there were a lot more ranches that, where people were living in the back country and surviving, making their goat cheese, packing it on donkeys, taking it out to a road head.
• 28:56
  Trudi Angell: Um, but that's disappearing.
• 28:58
  Trudi Angell: So, so it's, it's just been a wonderful thing with the film La Récua to capture that story and preserve that story.
• 29:08
  Track 1: So would you say, well, you definitely, you just said that this is a, this is a, a way of life that's definitely disappearing.
• 29:15
  Track 1: Um, What, what do you think is the future this way of life?
• 29:22
  Track 1: Um, and that's one of the things that, that struck me about the film is that it's, you get this dichotomy between a very traditional, self-sufficient, um, off the grid, you know, what we talk about, uh, lifestyle that's very tied, uh, to the past.
• 29:42
  Track 1: And then, you know, there's cell phones, there's, um, they're going to a, a modern, uh, city.
• 29:51
  Track 1: You know, they're trying to decide.
• 29:53
  Track 1: Dario talks about, um, well, well, I don't remember if it was himself, but this idea about, you know, what are the children gonna do?
• 30:01
  Track 1: Are they gonna go to the city to go to study, to university?
• 30:05
  Track 1: They're gonna stay.
• 30:07
  Track 1: And I think Azucena talks about how she wants to stay on the rancho.
• 30:10
  Track 1: Right.
• 30:10
  Track 1: So
• 30:11
  Trudi Angell: Mm-hmm.
• 30:12
  Damian Bacich: can you talk to us a little bit about how do you see.
• 30:16
  Damian Bacich: That, um, crossroads that these people are at, you know, in terms of maintaining this life and, but also being immersed in a modern world that, that, that touches really everybody now.
• 30:31
  Trudi Angell: right?
• 30:33
  Trudi Angell: Well, so back in the early eighties and the first time I rode into the canyon, uh, where the, where the rock art paintings are in the north end of the state of Baja California Sur there.
• 30:51
  Trudi Angell: there was no communication on many of the ranches.
• 30:54
  Trudi Angell: Then they got radios, they got the, the UHF radios, and there was, wow, there was communication before the, you know, where there wasn't any before.
• 31:05
  Trudi Angell: The communication prior to that had been fayuqueros.
• 31:10
  Trudi Angell: These people who wouldn't be the long range trucker kinds of mule pack teams that would go from one village to LA p, those were called the arrieros of the récuas.
• 31:26
  Trudi Angell: They would do the long distance, uh, merchant, uh, sell, buying and selling and trade.
• 31:35
  Trudi Angell: But there were others, fayuqueros, as one of elderly gentlemen, uh, says in, in the story, in the kind of the middle of the story in the film.
• 31:48
  Trudi Angell: He says, yeah, we had a couple of donkeys and we'd ride into the town and first we had two donkeys, and then we had six donkeys, and we'd buy this and we'd buy that and we'd buy this and we'd buy that.
• 32:01
  Trudi Angell: And, and so those were the fayuqueros, those were the people who would go kind of from ranch to ranch or shorter distances.
• 32:10
  Trudi Angell: And so they would all be called récuas, the, or caravans.
• 32:15
  Trudi Angell: But the ROS would normally do the shorter routes or, or go do a loop in a month and visit a ranch every night.
• 32:22
  Trudi Angell: They would be the pedalers, the pedalers who didn't have a cart, all they had were donkeys.
• 32:28
  Trudi Angell: And so they would load up their goods, move to the next ranch, and the ranches were pretty close together back then because like I say, there used to be a lot more people living on those outback ranches.
• 32:41
  Trudi Angell: Um, up until the nineties and the two thousands.
• 32:45
  Trudi Angell: So anyway, the Ros were the ones who carried the gossip and carried the news and, and brought in the goods.
• 32:52
  Trudi Angell: And now then in the eighties, nineties, and up until 2000, maybe 15, uh, about 2015 people started getting cell phones and they would get little internet towers.
• 33:08
  Trudi Angell: I think there's even a government program that would help the ranchers, uh, get some kind of an internet connection so that they would have, they'd have a little antenna and you could place it, and then suddenly people had internet.
• 33:21
  Trudi Angell: And one of the things we did, and this was about, gosh, must have been about six, eight years ago, um, I, I thought uhoh cell phones are coming into the ranches, uh, these really outback ranches that's gonna change everything.
• 33:38
  Trudi Angell: And it really did.
• 33:40
  Trudi Angell: Prior to the cell phones, I had an amazing experience with just one couple riding into a remote roadless ranch one time, and we rode for several hours through the mountains.
• 33:53
  Trudi Angell: Ended up down in this canyon where two or three families lived and there were some young children there, excuse me, several young children.
• 34:02
  Trudi Angell: My two guests got off their mules, went over and sat on a log by our little campsite area.
• 34:09
  Trudi Angell: And at that point, of course, the children come running off the hillside.
• 34:13
  Trudi Angell: They're like little goats.
• 34:14
  Trudi Angell: They're just leaping from rocks to rocks and coming down and, and climbing up into camp.
• 34:20
  Trudi Angell: And immediately the children, six years old, eight years old, 10 years old, start helping the cowboys, unpack the donkeys.
• 34:29
  Trudi Angell: They bring our gear into the camp and they see that there are new people.
• 34:34
  Trudi Angell: They go around, the children go around to each cowboy.
• 34:38
  Trudi Angell: Shake their hands, say hello, and then they come over to my guests and I've known them and so that we shake hands and say hello, give a little hug.
• 34:47
  Trudi Angell: But they go over to my guests who are sitting there just dumbfounded and they, each one goes to each adult, hi, my name is da da da da.
• 34:59
  Trudi Angell: Welcome to the ranch.
• 35:00
  Trudi Angell: And they shake hands and they go through And my two guests were just jaw drops and said, Trudy, those children, they're so at home in their place, they're, this is amazing.
• 35:18
  Trudi Angell: We've never had this happen before.
• 35:20
  Trudi Angell: And the children are brought up to be very respectful, to go around and shake everyone's hand, introduce themselves, and you know, really be with you.
• 35:34
  Trudi Angell: And then they went back over and they started joking around with the cowboys and helping'em unpack the donkeys again.
• 35:39
  Trudi Angell: But they, they took the time to go over and greet these people and say, wLa Récuame to our ranch.
• 35:45
  Trudi Angell: And the people on my trip were just like, oh, we can't believe this.
• 35:50
  Trudi Angell: And so the children, because they've been raised on those ranches in the Outback, they were on our trip on La Récua.
• 36:00
  Trudi Angell: It's just so much fun to watch them and see how comfortable they are in the back country and how polite they are.
• 36:11
  Trudi Angell: Um, and, and in that little interview story, uh, that you may have watched, it's a, the 10 minute interview, one of our, uh, filmmaking crew members who wasn't on the trip but who saw a lot of the background filming.
• 36:33
  Trudi Angell: Process because he looked at all the pieces of film.
• 36:37
  Trudi Angell: He was really amazed as well that he, he said all these people on the trip that you, that were being filmed are just so comfortable in their own space in the back country.
• 36:53
  Trudi Angell: It just, it comes across and the heart of the, the family aspect of the respect that the children have for the cowboys that the cowboys have for the children, it, it just comes out in the film and people have commented on that a lot.
• 37:12
  Damian Bacich: Yeah, that really, that really comes out.
• 37:15
  Damian Bacich: It's, yeah, you look at it.
• 37:17
  Damian Bacich: I can just imagine, um, I.
• 37:19
  Damian Bacich: My son, I've got a teenage son.
• 37:21
  Damian Bacich: He would love to be there doing that.
• 37:24
  Damian Bacich: Um, yeah.
• 37:26
  Damian Bacich: So I wanted to go back a little bit to the whole filmmaking aspect.
• 37:32
  Damian Bacich: One of the things that, that blew me away about this, this film is how beautiful it is.
• 37:38
  Damian Bacich: It's, not only engaging in terms of the story and the, the people, the characters, um, but it's just, it's visually, uh, breathtaking.
• 37:50
  Damian Bacich: And so, um, the, yeah, it's just captivating.
• 37:55
  Damian Bacich: So I'm wondering, you started out by saying you really didn't have a filmmaking background, so how did you, uh, how did you become a filmmaker?
• 38:04
  Damian Bacich: How did you assemble the, you had a crew, you had editors and camera people.
• 38:10
  Damian Bacich: How did you do that?
• 38:12
  Damian Bacich: What was that like?
• 38:14
  Trudi Angell: Um, I think because I worked with Gary and Cody, um, McClintock helping to make that film Vaquero and in fact in the credits, um, they named me, um, Associate producer on that film, even though I thought I was chief cook and bottle washer And so I think just riding along with them, riding along with you.
• 38:46
  Trudi Angell: You know who Doug McConnell is in the Bay Area back roads?
• 38:50
  Trudi Angell: Doug McConnell?
• 38:52
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 38:52
  Trudi Angell: Okay.
• 38:53
  Trudi Angell: Well, Doug McConnell, maybe he was, he might've been my first experience with, uh, doing some filming in the Loreto area.
• 39:01
  Trudi Angell: Somehow he was coming down to film Wales on the Pacific side, but he also wanted to, he knew about the history of the El Camino Real and the missions and he wanted, and so somebody pointed out him out that to me and said, oh, well, Trudy should, you know, you should talk to Trudy.
• 39:19
  Trudi Angell: So I went and picked him and his crew up at the airport.
• 39:24
  Trudi Angell: Uh, in Loreto way back, let's see, Olivia was about five years old, so that was almost 30 years ago, and he did, uh, the, the one, uh, his crew came down and they did the one, um, episode of Bay Area Back Roads was about Baja and about the connection between the missions and all that Loretto.
• 39:46
  Trudi Angell: So anyway, it was fun to see over the years as a couple other team film teams came down, they all said, well, go to Trudy if you wanna know something about cowboys and ranches and, and El Camino oral and, and that kind of stuff.
• 40:00
  Trudi Angell: So I had a few, uh, opportunities to work with some film crews.
• 40:05
  Trudi Angell: So what I noticed mostly is, yeah, you need a good team and you need a team who works well together and loves what they're doing in the area that they're doing at.
• 40:17
  Trudi Angell: So back in 2015, we took Cowboys from Baja Dario being one of them, and Azucena's grandfather being one of them.
• 40:29
  Trudi Angell: Um, out to Elko, Nevada.
• 40:33
  Trudi Angell: And I saw with a display there done by my friend Fermín Reygadas, who you also see in the film a little bit at the party in La Paz, um, you, he, he had put together a little museum piece in Elko, Nevada for the, some number, th number 31 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko.
• 40:56
  Trudi Angell: And we, the Cowboys, our cowboys and our singers and our band were, uh, basically the stars of the show for that particular, particular year.
• 41:06
  Trudi Angell: And I saw some photographs that my friend Ferin had gotten ahold of one of his students.
• 41:12
  Trudi Angell: He's a professor at the university in La Paz about rural tourism and about cowboys.
• 41:18
  Trudi Angell: And he just did a beautiful book.
• 41:20
  Trudi Angell: On Old Californio saddle making, and it's in Spanish, and he published it in Mexico, of course.
• 41:28
  Trudi Angell: So anyway, he knew this student, a young woman who has, who had her focus for her photography, had been, uh, uh, to capture ranch life because she also knew even at a young age that this was a fading thing and it needed to be captured.
• 41:46
  Trudi Angell: And the, the, the stories of the people on the ranches were so important for her to capture.
• 41:52
  Trudi Angell: And I saw some of her photography and I went, oh, this woman really has a, a sense of heart for these people who live out here.
• 42:01
  Trudi Angell: So when Dario told me in 2017, Trudy, I wanna make a film, she was the first person I went to.
• 42:09
  Trudi Angell: She grew up in La Paz, she lived in La Paz.
• 42:12
  Trudi Angell: Um, so Dio told me this in like February, 2017 and by May, 2017, I was down in La Paz and interviewing her and her husband, who are both filmmakers and photographers and have already published some books and, and things.
• 42:29
  Trudi Angell: And I discovered that she had also done a trip called a cabalgata, which is, um, uh, a movement of people on horseback, usually on some type of a pilgrimage mission, or to head out to a party that's going on about, um, maybe a Saint Day Festival at a particular village.
• 42:53
  Trudi Angell: And people will do their al Gatas and round up a bunch of folks and, and ride to get to, um, to a, a festivity.
• 43:03
  Trudi Angell: And so she had ridden for 11 or 12 days with a group of men from La Paz all the way to Son Javier for its traditional annual, uh, St day festival.
• 43:16
  Trudi Angell: And so I knew that if she liked to do that, she'd probably love to work on this film.
• 43:22
  Trudi Angell: And so I asked her, and, and she would know the hardships.
• 43:26
  Trudi Angell: She would know what she was getting into.
• 43:29
  Trudi Angell: So I wanted to make sure I had a team of people that knew what they were getting into or could be really resilient and positive about, you know, just getting out there and riding with those cowboys.
• 43:40
  Trudi Angell: And so the two of them, Alejandro, uh, Rivas and Elizabeth Moreno is her name, they, they signed on right away.
• 43:50
  Trudi Angell: They were very excited to do this whole film.
• 43:53
  Trudi Angell: And they were the ones who introduced me to the sound guy, young man named Rogelio Munoz, who had to, for the first time in his life, get on a mule.
• 44:11
  Trudi Angell: Carry his, the boom.
• 44:13
  Trudi Angell: So he's riding along
• 44:14
  Damian Bacich: Oh wow.
• 44:15
  Trudi Angell: on the back of a mule with a boom, or he has the little microphones on the pin to the lapel of Dio and, and a couple other people on the trail.
• 44:26
  Trudi Angell: And he's trying to capture, trying to keep his boom and his microphone out of the, you know, the visual of the camera And he's very good at it.
• 44:37
  Trudi Angell: And so that's why they suggested that he come along.
• 44:41
  Trudi Angell: And so as a big plus beyond all that skill of, of his being able to know what he has to capture on the trail to make this film be so realistic.
• 44:55
  Trudi Angell: Like you remember the scene where that donkey bites off that piece of tree, uh, big branch and you hear the crunch, crunch and you can almost hear the drool dripping out of his.
• 45:08
  Trudi Angell: Because that was Rogelio's job, was to capture all of that background view, uh, sound that would make a viewer of the film feel like you're right there.
• 45:21
  Trudi Angell: And he did it wonderfully.
• 45:22
  Trudi Angell: And he did it with a sense of humor.
• 45:24
  Trudi Angell: He did it with enthusiasm and he and Dario became best buddies, on the,
• 45:32
  Damian Bacich: okay.
• 45:32
  Trudi Angell: the whole ride.
• 45:33
  Trudi Angell: And so, you know, the whole crew really clicked as, as a group moving along down the trail.
• 45:41
  Trudi Angell: The children, Rogelio had tons of fun with the children.
• 45:45
  Trudi Angell: The children teased him all the time.
• 45:48
  Trudi Angell: 'cause he had a big, long ponytail.
• 45:50
  Trudi Angell: He wouldn't wear a cowboy hat.
• 45:52
  Trudi Angell: He, he would wear something like a wrap around his head or something like that.
• 45:56
  Trudi Angell: And they were teasing him all the time.
• 45:58
  Trudi Angell: And they just had tons of fun.
• 46:00
  Trudi Angell: So all of that, you know, brought the fla, brought the flavor into the film of Of just ease and friendship and comradery and uh, yeah, it just brings it out.
• 46:15
  Trudi Angell: There are so many people who have said, well, you go riding along with this team of people as they're leaving Kdu and you, then you see them get into the village of Sun, Javier.
• 46:28
  Trudi Angell: This is about 20 minutes into the film or so, and, and it shocks them.
• 46:33
  Trudi Angell: They're like, oh, oh, wait a minute.
• 46:36
  Trudi Angell: This is okay.
• 46:37
  Trudi Angell: This is actually, there's cars and there's people using cell phones, taking pictures of our cowboys coming in.
• 46:43
  Trudi Angell: And it shocks people that here they were out in the back country and just kind of flowing along.
• 46:51
  Trudi Angell: And Dario does this traditional, very traditional cowboy thing, um, early on in the film as they're writing and, and presents a riddle to the group if that presents the riddle to the group and Uh, so that's part of it.
• 47:06
  Trudi Angell: That's part of the, he's the campfire philosopher.
• 47:10
  Trudi Angell: He's the, he's the mule writing poet.
• 47:13
  Trudi Angell: He's the keeper of old track California traditions.
• 47:18
  Trudi Angell: And, um, and you just learn, you just begin to love him because of all that he is sharing with the world, basically.
• 47:28
  Damian Bacich: Yeah.
• 47:28
  Damian Bacich: You know, the old California traditions.
• 47:31
  Damian Bacich: Um, what do you think you're, you're a California and Alta Californian, right?
• 47:38
  Damian Bacich: And residing in Baja California, and one of the, um, I think one of the, the subtexts of this film is, is the fact that, that when we say the word California, we're really talking about a much larger piece of property than we normally think of.
• 47:56
  Damian Bacich: Right?
• 47:57
  Damian Bacich: What do you think about that today in 2023?
• 48:05
  Damian Bacich: this, this idea, what do you, do you think that there's hope for a.
• 48:10
  Damian Bacich: A better sense of continuity between two regions on each side of the border, or, or, yeah.
• 48:18
  Damian Bacich: How do you see that?
• 48:20
  Trudi Angell: I would hope so.
• 48:21
  Trudi Angell: And I've been involved peripherally with a group called em, C A R E M, down in ate.
• 48:30
  Trudi Angell: Um, and together we've kind of been imagining me to a lesser degree and they to a more formal degree of trying to put together, um, the concept of the three Californias.
• 48:46
  Trudi Angell: So the original California, which goes basically, uh, I always use my, my arm as a, as a map of California, right?
• 48:56
  Trudi Angell: So the, the knuckle down here is Cabo, and then the elbow is up by Guerrero Negro at the state line between Baja, California Sur.
• 49:05
  Trudi Angell: And, and Tijuana and San Diego are up here at my shoulder.
• 49:09
  Trudi Angell: So I'm using that all the time as, as a map to, to give people a sense of the real first.
• 49:15
  Trudi Angell: California is really this whole area in my lower from my elbow down.
• 49:21
  Damian Bacich: Mm-hmm.
• 49:21
  Trudi Angell: And, um, that has disappeared.
• 49:25
  Trudi Angell: Well, it was even in the mid 18 hundreds here, uh, that people were still referring.
• 49:30
  Trudi Angell: And maybe even in the early 19 hundreds, people were still referring in newspapers and Uh, wasn't there an Alta California newspaper?
• 49:39
  Trudi Angell: Uh, believe, and it was called the Alta California.
• 49:43
  Trudi Angell: And so they were still understanding that, you know, they, this upper California was just basically where the missionaries came as they traveled north up from lower California or Baja California.
• 49:59
  Trudi Angell: And so,
• 50:00
  Damian Bacich: Or Antigua, California.
• 50:01
  Damian Bacich: Right.
• 50:02
  Trudi Angell: pardon,
• 50:03
  Damian Bacich: Or Antigua, California.
• 50:05
  Trudi Angell: Antigua, California.
• 50:06
  Trudi Angell: Antigua California is a great, a great way to, um, describe that.
• 50:10
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 50:11
  Trudi Angell: the the old original California.
• 50:14
  Trudi Angell: And so, you know, the, this whole sense of how people traveled, like nowadays, because I've ridden mules up and down the peninsula for many, many years, I, I've ridden actually from Cabo all the way to Tecate.
• 50:33
  Trudi Angell: Uh, one year with, uh, my daughter and a couple other women, women friends.
• 50:38
  Trudi Angell: We called it the"Mula Mil" the Mule, 1000.
• 50:42
  Trudi Angell: And so, um, and we're hopefully doing it again pretty soon.
• 50:47
  Trudi Angell: Um, you know, the, the, my sense of how that was done, probably not too many people get, get it, that that was just a normal way of life.
• 51:00
  Trudi Angell: Back in the forties, fifties, sixties before, before the, the Trans Peninsular Highway was put in from Tijuana and finished up all the way down in the early seventies, down connecting Cabo and La Paz to Ensenada and that whole central part of the peninsula.
• 51:23
  Trudi Angell: There, there are some wonderful books in Spanish written by a woman named, um, Estela.
• 51:32
  Trudi Angell: Davi.
• 51:34
  Damian Bacich: Uh, yes.
• 51:35
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 51:36
  Trudi Angell: Have you read
• 51:36
  Damian Bacich: I met, I met Estella a number of years ago at the California Missions Conference
• 51:42
  Trudi Angell: Perfect.
• 51:43
  Trudi Angell: Okay.
• 51:44
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 51:44
  Trudi Angell: She's a
• 51:45
  Damian Bacich: Oh, no, excuse me.
• 51:46
  Damian Bacich: No, no, no.
• 51:46
  Damian Bacich: It's Stella AVEs.
• 51:47
  Damian Bacich: That's somebody else.
• 51:48
  Damian Bacich: Esella AVEs came to U C L A and she spoke about her book.
• 51:55
  Damian Bacich: Um, La perla del mojón",
• 51:58
  Trudi Angell: mm-hmm.
• 51:59
  Trudi Angell: Yes.
• 52:00
  Damian Bacich: Estella.
• 52:00
  Damian Bacich: Yes, yes.
• 52:00
  Damian Bacich: Yeah.
• 52:01
  Damian Bacich: have her book autographed by Esella.
• 52:04
  Trudi Angell: Great.
• 52:04
  Trudi Angell: Well, she, she has interviewed a lot of people, um, and, and written their stories down.
• 52:11
  Trudi Angell: And her, you know, as you know her, the background of most of her books have to do with her own family's old stories and the past down information and, and stuff.
• 52:23
  Trudi Angell: And, uh, yeah, she's wonderful.
• 52:24
  Trudi Angell: She's still, uh, hanging out in La Paz.
• 52:28
  Trudi Angell: She finished writing another book called"Conversaciones y memorias" Maybe about five years ago, and I went to to visit her and she gave me a copy.
• 52:39
  Trudi Angell: And in that it speaks, she tells one story about an interview with an elderly man who, uh, was very famous in the Loreto and Kodu area.
• 52:50
  Trudi Angell: He was a teacher, uh, and would ride on horseback to go around to many of the places.
• 52:56
  Trudi Angell: And there was a woman back in the, uh, forties and fifties, uh, thirties, forties and fifties.
• 53:05
  Trudi Angell: And she had her, she was a fayuquera, she was a paddler, and she had her route of taking goods around to all those ranches.
• 53:15
  Trudi Angell: Her name was Mari...
• 53:19
  Trudi Angell: Maria....
• 53:21
  Trudi Angell: Oh, I'll have to think of it later.
• 53:23
  Trudi Angell: But, um, there was a story in there about her, how she She would help people if they wanted to move farther north with all of their stuff from DU or um, La Purísima or Loreto, they would hire her, she would be the moving van, and they would ride for two months to get up to where this, these people might wanna, wanna move to.
• 53:48
  Trudi Angell: They would load all their worldly goods onto a dozen donkeys and they would just travel for a month or two up the peninsula, just like the Padres did with Padre Serra, who went on foot, of course.
• 54:02
  Trudi Angell: But, uh, Portola and the, the people and, and so it's really fun having done that ride myself, I really connect with those old historic stories about travel by Mule, um, up the peninsula.
• 54:21
  Trudi Angell: I get it.
• 54:21
  Trudi Angell: I, I understand now every time I drive up the Peninsula, Every 10 minutes is, you know, like a day of travel every 10 minutes on the highway.
• 54:32
  Trudi Angell: And I can, I can see, and I can kind of visualize, okay, well Portolá, of course, in this area would've wanted to go up over that ridge and down through valley.
• 54:41
  Trudi Angell: 'cause there's more feed or, uh, there's, there was a little creek down in there.
• 54:46
  Trudi Angell: So, so those kinds of things are just things that, that I could absorb and relate to, uh, because I've done some of that myself.
• 54:54
  Trudi Angell: Now.
• 54:55
  Damian Bacich: Well, what I really like about this, uh, documentary is it kind of exemplifies how, um, contrary to maybe to what we might think, how modern technology in some ways, especially in this case, filmmaking, technology, et cetera, can put us in touch with the, the past and with the, the history that, um, is underneath our feet and with parts of traditional life that are disappearing.
• 55:32
  Damian Bacich: So, um, it's one of those cases where, where we can, where we can use modern technology to really, um, help maintain memory of the past.
• 55:43
  Trudi Angell: Mm-hmm.
• 55:45
  Damian Bacich: And so, Well, I got to see in a, um, I was able to see the film through, um, you know, a special, um, streaming event that you were doing for, for a certain period in August.
• 55:59
  Damian Bacich: I'm wondering now, as we close out here, how can thousands and thousands of people see this movie that I really hope, um, they'll be able to,
• 56:10
  Trudi Angell: Right.
• 56:10
  Trudi Angell: Well,
• 56:11
  Damian Bacich: are plans?
• 56:12
  Trudi Angell: yeah, the, well, I, I love the full feature film, uh, because of all of the aspects of what, what is tied together at the end of the film, talking about the children and how they're being raised and how, yes, education is important, but so is life on the ranch and, you know, their, their own struggles with trying to decide what they're going to do in life.
• 56:37
  Trudi Angell: Both those children, actually, by the way, are, are still living on the ranches and we are Speaking of technology, um, ASNA has been learning English from a young girl, a woman in La Paz, who's a friend of ours, who is teaching her, uh, two times a week.
• 56:57
  Trudi Angell: She has an English class with her, so that Asna will be able to live on the ranch and also we hope become a guide to take people down and work with the cowboys who are up there and maybe even be the first young woman guide who will actually, she knows how to pack a donkey.
• 57:18
  Trudi Angell: So when her father may not be able to do it sometime, well, she would be next in line.
• 57:23
  Trudi Angell: Her brother, her little brother who would be likely to go onto the guide role up there for taking people in, uh, and wouldn't have as many skills.
• 57:34
  Trudi Angell: But she is 16 now.
• 57:36
  Trudi Angell: Uh, since she was 10 on the, on the filming, and now it's been years later, so now she's 16.
• 57:42
  Trudi Angell: And when she's 18 we can actually, um, act, uh, see if she can get onto the guide, role and do her own donkey packing up.
• 57:51
  Damian Bacich: excellent.
• 57:52
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 57:53
  Trudi Angell: And so one of the things I would like to do with the film is, um, uh, I, we're working on a PBS cut right now, and we already have it cut down to just about an hour.
• 58:07
  Trudi Angell: It has to be a little bit less than that for the P B s um, hour.
• 58:11
  Trudi Angell: It's
• 58:12
  Damian Bacich: Ah, okay.
• 58:13
  Trudi Angell: six minutes and 46 seconds or something.
• 58:16
  Trudi Angell: And so we're working on that.
• 58:18
  Trudi Angell: And so I'm hoping that next year, uh, about this time, it might be something that people would, lots of, lots of people would be able to see on P B S.
• 58:28
  Trudi Angell: uh, but a shortened version.
• 58:30
  Damian Bacich: Hmm.
• 58:30
  Trudi Angell: And for the longer version, once we have that out on p b s, then I would be able to post it on my website, sell it at our online store and things like that.
• 58:40
  Trudi Angell: And, um, and so I, I haven't really resolved all of the questions about distribution, but um, it distribution is changing anyway in the world of film.
• 58:54
  Trudi Angell: And I'm in a group right now who is discussing and getting their own films out into the world and, and, uh, getting more eyes on their product.
• 59:04
  Trudi Angell: And, and that's hopefully one thing that we'll do.
• 59:07
  Trudi Angell: The other thing, like you, you mentioned there's so much education in there, like you've shown RA vaquero to your, uh, to your students in the past.
• 59:17
  Trudi Angell: And I would like to make an educational cut because there we have so much footage.
• 59:22
  Damian Bacich: Yeah.
• 59:23
  Trudi Angell: Of things that Darrio really had hoped would come out in the film.
• 59:27
  Trudi Angell: But the editors kind of grabbed different threads and different storylines to weave the whole story of the trip together and left some of what Darrio considered important parts about the history of the arrieros, the history of the saddle, making, the history of, uh, but there was just too much of it, much, uh, too much material.
• 59:49
  Trudi Angell: So at some point I would like to put together an educational cut, maybe a small series of 2, 3 20 minutes sections with a, with some information in the background.
• 1:00:00
  Trudi Angell: You're actually a person who has now come into my radar of thinking, Ooh, you could help me with this putting together an educational background, uh, and what would be the most interesting.
• 1:00:12
  Trudi Angell: So at, at some point, it'd be wonderful to speak with you about that.
• 1:00:16
  Damian Bacich: Happy to.
• 1:00:18
  Damian Bacich: Well, Trudy, I want to be respectful of your time.
• 1:00:20
  Damian Bacich: This is, uh, once again, this has been a real pleasure.
• 1:00:24
  Damian Bacich: Um, the, the film is called La Récua, uh, the Mule Train or the PAC Train.
• 1:00:31
  Damian Bacich: And, um, I said, I hope everybody gets a chance to see it and for, uh, people to get a little idea of what it's all about and, um, more of a taste of the film and what you do.
• 1:00:44
  Damian Bacich: Where can they go?
• 1:00:46
  Trudi Angell: They can go to La Récua.com, so that would be L A R E C U A qua.com.
• 1:00:58
  Trudi Angell: And on there you can watch the trailer for sure.
• 1:01:01
  Trudi Angell: And that little 10 minute interview.
• 1:01:04
  Trudi Angell: And there's some lot of good background stories and background about the bios of the, uh, filmmakers as well.
• 1:01:11
  Trudi Angell: And, um, And then you can also, there's a little button down at the bottom of the homepage, uh, that where you can sign up to get information and get on our newsletter so that the next time we do another, uh, week long streaming screening, uh, on a platform that I'm using, then you, you could be on that list to, to find out about, um, when's the next time.
• 1:01:38
  Trudi Angell: It might, might do it in late October, also if you're in the Sacramento area, uh, in California.
• 1:01:46
  Trudi Angell: Then in, on October 3rd at the, um, uh, the Department of Natural Resources, the new building, downtown Sacramento Department of Natural Resources, uh, La Récua has been chosen to be a film presented there on October 3rd.
• 1:02:10
  Trudi Angell: To honor Latino Heritage Month, basically starts this Friday, I think, uh, up
• 1:02:16
  Track 1: The 15th.
• 1:02:18
  Trudi Angell: Yeah.
• 1:02:19
  Trudi Angell: And, um, so I hope to see you there, Damien, and,
• 1:02:23
  Damian Bacich: I would really to attend.
• 1:02:25
  Trudi Angell: and, and you'll be receiving actually a special invitation pretty soon in the mail.
• 1:02:29
  Trudi Angell: We have a, a discussion with the, um, the people.
• 1:02:33
  Trudi Angell: Tomorrow I have a Zoom meeting with the, the woman who's getting the official invitations ready to send out.
• 1:02:40
  Trudi Angell: And, um, and other people, uh, on, on the radar who are very interested in California history are, are on that list.
• 1:02:51
  Trudi Angell: But also it will start to be announced, I think, in the Sacramento Bee and other places, uh, with a link to be able to, uh, reserve a space.
• 1:03:00
  Trudi Angell: So they, they'll definitely, there's only 300 seats in the theater.
• 1:03:05
  Trudi Angell: So they'll want, uh, to make sure that, that people reserve a space so that we limit that there will, it'll cut off at 300.
• 1:03:14
  Trudi Angell: So, yeah.
• 1:03:16
  Damian Bacich: Well, that's great that I'm, I'm really looking forward to that and once again, all my compliments on the film and, um, I think what you're, what you're doing is wonderful and I hope more and more people hear about it.
• 1:03:29
  Damian Bacich: And, um, looking forward to the film getting, uh, greater distribution and the word getting out about what you're doing and about Darrio and his legacy.
• 1:03:41
  Trudi Angell: Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:42
  Trudi Angell: and especially in Baha, California Sur, uh, we're also working on a project to get the, the film, uh, is in its feature film format out to all the little villages and all the people who really deserve to, to see this film and understand that their heritage, their background, their knowledge, Um, and their history is so, so important so that it will honor them as well.
• 1:04:13
  Damian Bacich: Wonderful.
• 1:04:14
  Damian Bacich: Well, thank you Trudy.
• 1:04:15
  Damian Bacich: Uh, it's been a real pleasure.
• 1:04:18
  Trudi Angell: Okay, Igualmente and hope to see you soon on the third, if not sooner.
• 1:04:22
  Trudi Angell: And St.
• 1:04:23
  Trudi Angell: Helena.
• 1:04:24
  Damian Bacich: Okay.